Change Blindness Analysis

Simply put, attention is a tool by which certain sensory information is actively processed while the remainder is relatively ignored. While this allows for efficiency of perceptual processing, the selective nature of attention leads to a number of perceptual phenomena. One such phenomenon, as discussed by Simons & Ambinder (2005), is ‘change blindness’, i.e., the inability to detect change in a visual stimulus. Jensen et al. (2011) differentiate this from another phenomenon, ‘inattentional blindness’, in which an unexpected object is not detected within the field of view. Though both phenomena are fundamentally failings of visual awareness, each has its own set of cognitive influences and potential implications (Jensen et al., 2011). Moreover,
Inattentional blindness involves the allocation of attention, and encapsulates the tendency for unexpected objects to be unperceived if attentional resources are allocated elsewhere (Simons & Chabris, 1999). Change blindness, however, can be distilled as a failure in the comparison of a new visual input to an older input, and thus, necessarily involves memory as well. If an accurate (fully encoded) mental representation of an object is created, there is a greater likelihood that a change in that object would be detected (Jensen et al., 2011). Also, change detection may improve with practice (Simons & Ambinder, 2005); this stems from the effect of perceptual and attentional skill on change blindness (Pringle et al., 2001). Inattentional blindness, however, seems to have no such advantage (Jensen et al.,
One concerning consequence is distracted driving. Dividing attention to an auditory task while performing a visual task impairs the performance of the visual task (Gherri & Eimer, 2010). Relatedly, drivers identify fewer changes in a scene when they’re actively driving than when they’re passively observing (Wallis & Bülthoff, 2000). Taken together, it follows that increased attentional load may worsen change blindness, and thus, threaten safe driving. Similarly, plane crashes due to runway incursions may be heavily influenced by inattentional blindness: Kennedy et al. (2014) found that 70% of participants failed to notice an incursion stimulus during flight landing. Addressing these concerns and more, there is suggestion that further attention and perception research is tremendously important to answer a number of questions regarding public and personal safety in the future (Simons & Ambinder, 2005; Kennedy et al.,